Caribbean Export OUTLOOK 3rd Edition

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Exporter s ' Ins ights

Consultant Gynaecologist Dr. Juliet Skinner and Clinic Director Anna Hosford / Photo courtesy Barbados Fertility Centre

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Centre, with 25% of its patients coming from the US, second only to the burgeoning Caribbean home market. Barbados’ tourism appeal is also integral to the Centre’s unique value proposition. In addition to an on-site spa, the Centre offers all-inclusive vacation packages to its clients, with a range of premiere resorts, all coordinated by BFC in-house for the comfort of its patients. De Gale explained BFC’s logic: “When you take people out of the stress of their daily lives and you put them on a beach for a two-week holiday, stress is reduced, and pregnancy rates go up,” she said. “You can’t take the ‘Barbados’ out of Barbados Fertility Centre… Barbados as an island helps to create our success.” But success didn’t come without its challenges. Early after its inception, the Centre saw that it would have to overcome misperceptions about the quality of care at a new IVF outfit in an emerging market like the Caribbean, if it was to compete on an international scale. Therefore, in 2007, the Centre secured the industry-leading Gold Seal accreditation from Joint Commission International — falling in the league of the Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins Hospital —to give its clients the reassurance that it adhered to the highest standards of clinical care. Public education has also been crucial to establishing brand awareness, and the Centre has been actively maintaining a mass media and social media presence to demystify its IVF and other fertility solutions in the market. BFC was also visible during the height of the 2016 Zika epidemic, as an authority amid hysteria on Zika- related pregnancy complications. This deliberate visibility, combined with an enabling policy environment from

he global fertility industry has seen robust year-on- year growth as new advances in in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), and a steady increase in infertility rates, have shored up demand for assisted pregnancies. And while the United States and Europe still command the largest share of the industry, a small clinic in Barbados is heading off global competition to eke out a niche for itself with world-leading IVF success rates, and the unique value-added of Barbados’ tourism brand. Formed in 2002, the Barbados Fertility Centre is a partnership between Barbadian doctor Juliet Skinner and Irish IVF nurse, Anna Hosford. The Centre became their joint vision following Skinner’s return to Barbados in 1998, where local infertility rates showed up an untapped market for IVF solutions. Inevitably, the Centre’s ambitions were global. In an industry where one IVF unit typically serves a population of 750,000, the Barbados Fertility Centre has been outward- looking from the outset. Today, it is a major lynchpin in Barbados’ medical tourism offering. By 2017, the Centre had facilitated thousands of pregnancies for clients in the Caribbean, the far East, Australia, the United States and Europe. “On any given day, our waiting room is like the United Nations,” BFC Chief Operations Officer, Rachel de Gale, told Caribbean Export’s Outlook. Patients are drawn to the Centre’s high success rates — now at 67 per cent for women under-35 — and treatment costs that average around 40 per cent below that of fertility treatments in the United States. An aggressive marketing campaign in North America has paid dividends for the